


interiors

by doomcountry



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Bathing/Washing, Coda, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, POV Second Person, Self-Indulgent, Sharing Clothes, Sharing a Bed, non-sexual nudity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-27
Updated: 2019-10-27
Packaged: 2021-01-04 17:44:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,728
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21201584
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/doomcountry/pseuds/doomcountry
Summary: In the doorway, he fumbles with his keys. Their sound is loud in the silent stairwell. You don’t remember getting here.





	interiors

**Author's Note:**

> tossing this out there before it gets jossed this week, for [vili](https://twitter.com/Vi1ukissa) <3

In the doorway,

> he fumbles with his keys. Their sound is loud in the silent stairwell.
> 
> You don’t remember getting here. Down below and outside on the street the night is heavy and black overhead. Your hand is softly clutching the fabric of his coat at the crease of his elbow. You are soaked through with strange rain, your face grimy with sand and grit, your hair smelling stiffly of seawater; his face and throat are smeared and speckled with blood that isn’t his. You wonder how he managed to get you here without anyone stopping you, questioning that blood and this grime. Just a little more of his magic, you suppose. You grip his arm a little tighter. You have been holding his arm all this time.
> 
> He gets the key in the lock and turns it with a weighty _thunk. _The door opens with a creak and you feel his hand on your back, gently ushering you inside.
> 
> You wait for him to turn on the light. The door still open behind you. Here, he says. You blink in the sudden brightness.

* * *

In the front hall,

> he takes off his coat and hangs it on a hook. You do not have a coat. You watch him pull off his boots without unlacing them and toss them in the pile of shoes against the wall. The baseboard is scuffed where he has thrown and kicked his shoes a hundred times. Trainers and boots and house slippers and even a pair of sandals. You try to imagine him in sandals; it’s impossible. You smile a little, but he doesn’t see.
> 
> There is a short bench above the pile of shoes and you sit on it to take your own off. He watches, pressing his hands together as if he doesn’t know what to do with them. His hair hangs limp in his face. There is blood in it, too. You hold your shoes in your hands and he leans down to take them and nestle them safely among all his own.
> 
> Come in, he says, with all the gentleness in the world. You take his arm in your hand again. You are worried that, if you do not hold on to him, you will fall.
> 
> The hall is short and narrow. Packing boxes stacked against the wall. A stained runner underfoot. Passing the unlit kitchen you can make out cheap fittings and a bowl of browning fruit and a pot plant in the windowsill, its vines drooping, coiling, pouring down over the wall. The light in the ceiling flickers and hums. His hand rests on the back of your neck, soft, gentle, unhurried.

* * *

In the bathroom,

> he turns on the shower to let the hot water kick in. He leaves the door open to the rest of the flat.
> 
> He takes off his glasses and rests them on the precarious edge of the sink. He glances at himself in the mirror and then looks away. Looks at you, standing there next to him.
> 
> He touches your cheek with the tips of his fingers, as if wiping away tears that aren’t there. (You don’t feel like crying anymore—a miracle.) He tucks a strand of your salt-stiff hair behind your ear and gently takes your glasses off, too. He blurs out at the edges, but standing this close, you can still see his face. Another miracle.
> 
> Breathing is easier now than you can remember it being in months. Your eyes feel heavy and deep in your skull. Already the tiny room is filling with steam. It is not like that other fog. It’s warm and soft and rests against your skin like a whisper.
> 
> Can I—? he asks, and you say, Yes.
> 
> He takes the hem of your jumper in his hands and works it up and over and off you. Pressed against your nose it stinks of damp. Ruined. When you have slipped your arms out of it you feel instantly more free. He unbuttons your shirt and your trousers and helps you out of them, out of your wet, sand-caked socks. Never moving more than a few inches from you. His heat very near. You reach out to help him with his own shirt and undo three buttons before he softly pushes your hands away. It’s alright, he says. His voice is hoarse. You remember how loudly he had shouted your name. Why don’t you, he says, and trails off, and gestures to the shower, pounding water too hot for you. You undo another button anyway before you move past him to climb inside.
> 
> When he joins you the blood begins instantly to run down his face in pink rivulets like tear-tracks. There is barely room for the two of you inside but he doesn’t seem to care. You don’t care, either. In the caddy hanging from the showerhead behind him there is the sliver of a bar of soap, pale blue; two kinds of shampoo, one with the smell you recognize, his smell, that sort of faux-pine _for men _that comes in the dark blue bottle. Funny, you think. You had never considered his smell to be the smell of something that comes from a bottle. Had always sort of imagined it to just be _him. _Artificial pine, tobacco, damp concrete. The heat of the water and the steam has lifted that smell and you are surrounded in it. Enfolded, cocooned.
> 
> You are so tired suddenly. You lean against the shower wall, trying to ignore the spinning of your head. A few scant hours ago you were sitting on a beach somewhere, utterly alone. Now it seems almost silly to be here. The shampoo bottles behind his head. The ugly fluorescent light in the water-stained bathroom ceiling. His shoes in the hall. His hands on your shoulders, steadying you.
> 
> Here, he says. He takes that sliver of pale blue soap and a washrag, an old one, threadbare. He leans forward and wipes at the sand stuck to your face. You close your eyes and feel the rag against your eyelids, rubbing over your ears, your nose, gently over your lips. The soap had a smell once, but not anymore. You can sense its ghost.
> 
> He scrubs at your shoulders, your back. He scrubs hard, too hard, as if he is trying to rub life back into you. Call your blood to the surface of your skin. Maybe he is. He lets you lean against him, your face against his chest, where you can feel his heartbeat. He doesn’t say anything. His breathing is loud in here. This close, you can smell the blood running off his skin. Coppery. He cleans the sand and the clinging clamminess from the soft folds of you, his every touch considered. Never once strange or intruding. Against you his nakedness is kind, and familiar, somehow.
> 
> Once, twice, you reach up to smear away dried and stubborn gore from his face, and this time he lets you. He leans into your touch but he doesn’t stop his work until you are rubbed pink and you feel you have never been cleaner. He even smiles—a very sad, very soft, very faraway smile, and he puts a hand on your shoulder, in the curve of your neck. You put your arms around his middle and you stand there together in the pounding water, growing cooler now, running not quite so red from his body anymore.
> 
> Jon, you murmur. And he looks at you with his brows just slightly furrowed, waiting for you to speak again. But you just wanted to say his name. Feel it start in the space between your teeth and end on the roof of your mouth. A miracle.

* * *

In the kitchen,

> in an old, tatty _What the Ghost _T-shirt that is much too long for you and a pair of his joggers with a snapped elastic waistband, you sit with your knees up in one of his chairs. He leans wearily against the counter, listening to the very faint electric hum of the kettle. All his weight is held up in his arms braced against the linoleum. The grey sweatshirt he is wearing hangs off his shoulders and you realize only now how thin he has gotten, this last year. How much he has wasted away. The both of you disappearing slowly, in your own ways. You want to reach out and take his arm again.
> 
> He is making you tea. It is two in the morning. In the window past his dying, curling potted plant, you see two yellow streetlights, the glints of telephone wires. It rained earlier, but it is not raining now. Droplets stand out stark on the glass, like stars.
> 
> You feel warm, in his clothes, in his kitchen, your bare, very-clean feet resting on the edge of this chair. It all has so much more detail to it than it did before. You are noticing this: the nutrition labels on the boxes and cans on the shelf above the counter, the paint peeling from around the cupboard handle, the mismatched knobs on the kitchen drawers. The smudges of his fingerprints on the kettle and the faucet. A stain on the yellowish wall behind the coffee-maker. The echoes of old spills and mishaps on the white stovetop. Rust on the oven door edges. All of it so small and cramped. You look at the sharp wings of his shoulderblades jutting through his sweatshirt and remind yourself that you have been invited to take up this space. To be kind to yourself here.
> 
> Jon, you say, and he turns, the counter pressing into the small of his back.
> 
> Yes, he says. His eyes are bloodshot and his face is tight and exhausted.
> 
> _Let’s talk, _you want to say. There is an infinity of things that must be talked about. Things you need to get out, out of the depths of you, before all this peace is broken again, as it must be. But all of it, you think, things he already knows.
> 
> You want to thank him, or comfort him, or tell him again, again, again that you love him. You know he knows, but you must remind him. There is no energy in you to do any of it, though. You open your mouth and you close it again.
> 
> The electric kettle goes off. He looks at it, and back at you.
> 
> It’s late, Martin, he says softly. Let’s talk tomorrow.
> 
> You feel the gentle settling of deep relief. It’s good to be reminded that there is a tomorrow to talk in. Okay, you say.
> 
> Okay, he says.
> 
> You sit together at the table barely big enough for one, let alone two. He doesn’t have any milk or sugar, so you drink the tea plain, from a souvenir mug so worn from washing that its artwork has all but disappeared. He sits with his chin propped up in one hand and his other hand resting on your wrist, grounding it against the table. His skin soft. His cuticles torn from a thousand papercuts and nicks and the wear-and-tear of filing cabinets, banker’s boxes. You want to get up and go into his bathroom and find a box of plasters and cover each finger in them, wrapping up the scabs and torn skin. Soothing him. You don’t, though. You are too tired. Tomorrow, maybe. Tomorrow, while you talk, you can take care of him.

* * *

In the bedroom,

> where he insists that you will sleep, you sit on the sagging edge of his mattress while he turns off lights in the rest of the flat, triple-checks the locks on the door, wipes down the kitchen counter and puts away the towels in the bathroom. The duvet on his bed is grey, and so are the pillowcases; when you pull back the cover you see that the sheets are navy blue. You fold the cover back and smoothe it down.
> 
> The walls of this room are lined with cheap particle-board bookcases, their shelves bowing in the middles: tattered mass-market scifi pulp, the spines cracked and creased and the titles obliterated; massive anthologies that have never been touched; academic textbooks and clothbound things so old that they don’t have titles on them at all. Here and there, stray bookmarks, a notebook, pieces of loose paper, crumpled Post-Its and receipts. On the floors and stacked up the wall, unopened packing boxes, some labeled, most blank. _Vinyls, _reads one. _Winter Clothes. _The bed has no headboard. Nothing on the walls but two watercolors that would be just as at home in a hotel as in a real person’s bedroom. The floor needs vacuuming. There is a cobweb in one corner, grey with dust.
> 
> The light in the hall clicks off, and he comes into the room with you. He sits down gingerly beside you. His shoulders curl forward. You look at him. Damp hair swept half-heartedly back. Glasses sliding down his nose. Deep purple bags beneath his eyes. His lips chapped, his Adam’s apple jutting. You have both been to hell and back today. Now you are sitting in his bedroom, in his clothes. You want to say something, to call it out, to mark it. But you don’t. What does it matter anymore, when this most momentous thing has happened to you—that he has taken you home and cared for you and loved you in a hundred different ways?
> 
> He takes an anxious breath. What do you think? he says, the world’s weariest attempt at conversation. He gestures absently to the room, to the flat past it.
> 
> You are still looking at him. Placidly, you say, It looks like shit.
> 
> He stares at you. And then he cracks a grin. And then he starts to laugh, an incredulous wheeze more than anything, and you smile, you laugh a little too—he shakes his head, he leans to nudge you with his shoulder, and then very suddenly he is crying. His face has crumpled like wet paper. His breath comes short and fast and choked and hitched. His head drops between his trembling shoulders and he covers his face with his hands. You have never seen him cry before, and it stings, punctures deep inside your chest.
> 
> Jon, you say, softly, please don’t cry.
> 
> He turns in to you, grips you more tightly than he has all night. You grip him tightly back. You squeeze as hard as you can. You are real again and he must know this. You feel his ribs under your hands, his shoulderblades. You feel his collarbone against your face. His face against your shoulder. You squeeze until you feel his bones shift under his skin. You squeeze hard enough to bruise him. You feel his fingertips clutching at you, digging into your flesh, as if trying to find handholds, places to sink his grip into, places to keep ahold of you forever.
> 
> You run a hand up and down his back, the most you can do. The ridges of his spine beneath your fingers like a mountain range.
> 
> Love you, you say, through the rising lump in your throat, the prickling in your eyes, muffled against him.
> 
> He burrows his face into your shoulder even harder, as if he wants to crawl inside you.
> 
> I love you, too, he says. It comes out a stutter, ragged. Martin, he says.

* * *

In his bed,

> he climbs in behind you, and rests a hand flat against your back.
> 
> You close your eyes. Behind you he feels fever-hot. His breath occasionally soft against the back of your neck.
> 
> His weight on the mattress, the cold of his feet near yours. His hand steady on you. If you were to fall in your dreams he would be there to catch you. Better still, maybe you will not dream at all. Maybe your dreams will uncoil from the back of your head and slip unnoticed into his mouth. You know without knowing how that he won’t ever let a nightmare disturb your rest, ever again. Not in his bed, here with him.
> 
> You seek his other hand with your own. Pull his arm over your body. Hold it tenderly against you.
> 
> You could uncurl your body and find his angles to rest against. You could unmake your smallness here with him.
> 
> He would let you.
> 
> He loves you. A miracle.


End file.
